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The personal site of Tom Coates, co-founder of Product Club

Two more Digital Democracy Teach-In events come and go. The guys from meetup.com put together a couple of presentations including some useful statistics and a few nice punchlines, but I’m not sure I learned anything particularly new during it. Certainly I didn’t feel my head trying to articulate itself into any strange new shapes. And next up the political weblogging panel, which I’ve decided to abandon almost on principle – not because it’s about weblogs, but because political weblogging as an end unto itself seems to me not to have matured past tabloid tactics of name-calling, mischaracterisation and “Am I right? Am I right?“-style calls to the converted. My general impression of this part of the event is that it’s more aimed at explaining current fairly-mainstream technologies and approaches to politicos rather than looking at the emergent technologies that might interest the geekier audiences (and me).